


An Evening With The Seeker

by serendipityxxi



Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-13
Updated: 2009-11-13
Packaged: 2017-11-04 23:18:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serendipityxxi/pseuds/serendipityxxi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard shares a little Hartland history with Kahlan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Evening With The Seeker

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [](http://farfromover.livejournal.com/profile)[**farfromover**](http://farfromover.livejournal.com/) over on [](http://legendland.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://legendland.livejournal.com/)**legendland** the seeker challenge comm for our gift giving challenge (only one of a ton of different kinds of challenges we have over there.) I know the story of Medusa isn’t right, I edited it a bit to fit with The Midlands.
> 
> Disclaimer: Not mine. No money. Don't sue.

It hadn't eluded Richard's notice that Kahlan had rather a lot of hair. It was nice to look at, cascading down her back, or streaming out behind her when they rode. It even smelled pretty, like lavender. On the few occasions he'd had cause to touch it; it had been soft and smooth like silk or some other fine material. One could say Richard had developed a sort of fascination with her hair. So when the occasion arose that allowed him to get close to it well Richard wasn’t going to complain.

Kahlan lifted the brush to her hair with a grimace, her arms had been wrenched roughly behind her back today by a D'Haran soldier in a fight, but she couldn't go to bed without brushing her hair. Spending every night in a new and strange place, often outside was not the norm for her and being able to perform her nightly rituals meant a lot to her; they were a piece of home when there was very little of that to be had. She sighed and switched the brush to her left hand but that hurt just as much, all the way up to the shoulder. She groaned very softly to herself and was resigning herself to going to sleep with a rat's nest on her head when Richard sat down next to her. He pulled the brush out of her hand and arched his eyebrows at her wordlessly. Kahlan looked at him in surprise for a few seconds before she gave in and turned around. Richard smiled at the back of her head then began to pull the brush through her hair starting from the crown of her head causing a wordless cry to erupt from Kahlan's lips as it immediately caught in a tangle.

"With long hair you've got to start from the bottom and work your way up," she told him, rubbing the sore spot gingerly.

"Sorry," he muttered, cheeks pinking with embarrassment in a way that Kahlan found completely endearing.

He pulled all her hair over her shoulders this time and held it back in a make shift horse tail with one hand while he used the other to pull the brush through the ends he held. He worked slowly but efficiently through the length of her hair and soon it hung smooth and glossy down her back in waves. He ran the brush one or two times more through it from the top of her head all the way down to the ends so the bristles of the brush tickled against her lower back through her hair, making sure he'd gotten every knot. He set the brush aside and ran his fingers through the length of it a few times, Kahlan was so relaxed her eyes were starting to slip closed as he began a slow massage of her scalp and then her neck and shoulders, relieving some of the aches from the day.

"All done?" Kahlan asked not with a little regret as his hands stilled.

"Guess so," Richard replied, just as disappointed. He was about to move from behind her when a flash of light in the sky caught his attention. “A shooting star!” he exclaimed, pointing over her shoulder.

Kahlan was quick to follow the direction his finger indicated.

“Make a wish,” he murmured, lips millimeters from her ear, voice low and confiding like they were sharing a secret.

“You know what I’d wish for,” she replied, actually divulging a secret. They’d never actually addressed what they could not have, speaking around it in half sentences and insinuations. She did not break that code tonight either but they both felt the enormity of her statement as it sat between them.

“That’s not some kind of portent-full shooting star that Rahl might be travelling by is it?” Richard asked, half in jest to break the serious mood that had overcome them, half because it might actually be a possibility.

Kahlan laughed and relaxed a little to lightly lean against him. “No, Richard. That’s just a plain old shooting star,” she assured him. “Don’t you have those in Hartland?” she asked.

“Oh, we do.” He picked up a lock of her hair and began idly twirling it around his fingers. “We have shooting stars, and we have almost all the same constellations you have but they’re in different places in the sky this far away I guess.”

“Over here we say the constellations tell the story of the history The Midlands,” Kahlan told him. Richard laughed gently and Kahlan could feel the sounds reverberating deep in his chest as well as hear them. Being this close to him gave her a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach, like a hot mug of cider on a cold winter’s evening.

“We say the same thing too. Before the boundary the Midlands and Westland were all one land, the history must be much of the same I should think.”

Kahlan nodded. “Tell me some of the history of Westland,” she requested. “You must feel like you’ve had a crash course in the history of the Midlands and yet I know almost nothing of Westland beyond where the Boundary lies.” Kahlan’s request was twofold she was genuinely curious about the place Richard was from and she had always loved learning about the history and customs of all the different people in the lands.

Richard was silent for a moment or two, considering the stars above them. “If you look way far over to the left,” he pointed. “There’s a small cluster of stars a series of ‘S’ shapes arranged around a single brighter star. The brighter star is what you’ll spot first most likely.” Kahlan looked and looked and finally saw what he was talking about. “That is the Gorgon constellation. The story goes that the Gorgon was once a woman so beautiful that only one with a heart of stone could not love her. However, she was a hateful being who took great pleasure in the pain of others. If anyone came into the woods surrounding her home they were bitten by snakes she let loose, their venom would petrify their victims and they would die slow agonizing deaths of starvation in the woods if they were not first eaten alive.”

“The story now reminds me of the Mord Sith. The perversion of beauty with the Gorgon and the perversion of the kindness of the Mord Sith…” Richard trailed off.

Kahlan covered his hand with her own.

“Directly ahead of you there,” she nodded in the direction, “is the constellation Libron. It is made up of seven stars that form scales although I personally have never really been able to imagine the scales,” she laughed. “They are the scales of justice in The Midlands. They are the symbol of The Seeker, the symbol all Confessors try to live by, the symbol Wizards were sworn by before this dark time… They are scales of balance. The story goes that when the world is in turmoil the scales show that imbalance, then comes the Seeker,” she turned and smiled at him. “We are doing what we can to put things right, Richard. That is all we can do.”

Richard nodded and smiled back if a bit wanly, turning his hand over to thread his fingers with hers and bringing them up to rest on their knees. Kahlan rested her head once more on his shoulder and pointed off into the distance with her free hand.

“Now that constellation over there…”

~ Fin


End file.
